


Colorblind

by BladedDarkness



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen, Light Angst, Soulmates, Universe Alterations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 15:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7579444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BladedDarkness/pseuds/BladedDarkness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara loves too much, in every way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Colorblind

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I could say I knew where this came from. Mostly, it's just me trying to push through the difficulties I've been having with focusing on my other works because July has been a wild ride. So here, have some Kara and missed opportunities and light angst?

**White**

 

Her mark comes in when she is almost five years old.

 

It tickles, and itches. The bleached skin shimmers like crystal dust when she traces her fingertips over it. She doesn’t recognize the symbols either, but when she shows her parents, they get silent for a while, sharing looks that she doesn’t understand. 

 

Then they tell her that the language is one of Earth, so far away. Kara doesn’t like that. She has been to several planets, but never one at such a great distance. She’s happy right here on Krypton, and she tells her parents as much. 

 

They just give her a sad smile that she doesn’t understand for several years until the door to her pod is slipping closed. 

 

She wakes up to a Kal-El that is too old and a mark the color of Rao that pulses like blood when touched.

 

**Red**

 

Kal-El tells her that humans have different meanings attached to the colors of their soul marks than Kryptonians.

 

On Krypton, red marks were seen as blessed, that no matter how many difficulties a couple may have, arguments and differences in opinion, strife and struggle, they will persevere through their suffering for their Houses, for Krypton, for Rao.

 

Kal-El looks at her sadly when he sees her crimson wrist, though, and she learns that on Earth, red is the color of heartbreak. Love never flows both ways between a bond that is scarlet against the skin.

 

Kara looks at Jeremiah and Eliza, the ease of their love, and their very definitely  _ not _ red marks, and their generous affection. She remembers the stiffness that was the staple of so many Kryptonian couples that she saw, the grim smiles that one of the pair would give when the other was affectionate in public. White and red soul marks are all Kara has ever known.

 

She thinks humans might have the right idea about the color of marks, after all.

 

Which makes it hurt all the more.

 

They’ve never met, but her bond mate has already rejected her, has given up on her.

 

She was too late to care for Kal-El, and too late for her bond mate to care for her.

 

Kara has lost her entire world, lost everything she had expected to have on Krypton.

 

The three marks underneath don’t inspire much confidence in this new world either.

 

**Black**

 

She panics when she meets Alexandra Danvers and her third mark goes black, sure it means something awful.

 

Kal-El reassures her, tells her that it is natural for the bond to change now that she has met Alex. Black isn’t bad, he tells Kara. Black is the absence of every color a bond can be, while white was the potential of every color.

 

She doesn’t entirely understand. Isn’t absence bad?

 

It ends up being a language issue, yet another thing Kara has to navigate between this new world, new culture, new powers, new marks and colors, and new languages. And really primitive math and science.

 

Kal-El butchers Kryptonian. A lot. Kara figures it out years later, thanks in part to Alex. Black is the absence of all color, yes, but the soul mark side of that is that the mark is absorbing,  _ holding _ , all possibilities of bonds. And white reflects every possibility, every color, away, because the bond mates have never met, have never crossed wavelengths, paths,  _ lives _ .

 

It digs the knife in a little bit deeper about her red mark, but Kara is relieved to finally understand her mark shared with Alex.

 

Alex looks between her own mark and Kal-El and Kara. The Kryptonian glyphs that spell out Kara’s name stand out like charcoal against the pale skin (later she finds out that Alex wasn’t sure at first which name was spelled out in Kryptonian on her suddenly onyx second mark, and that her parents and Alex had always assumed until that moment that the two marks with the strange writing were one mark instead).

 

Kara stares between Alex and her wrist, dark as the starless night, and hopes.

 

Her mark with Alex’s name stays black for years, constantly in that state of flux, but sometimes tinged through with specks and tiny strokes of orange to light yellow to chartreuse to an almost-green.

 

**Grey**

 

“You have to wear this if you’re going to school,” Alex says, tossing the band at her. It goes more than halfway up her forearm and smells strongly of cow and chemicals. 

 

“Why?” Kara scrunches her nose and Alex sighs, and the mark on her wrist for Alex flickers with her exasperation. It doesn’t terrify her quite as much anymore that the bond reacts strongly to Alex’s teenaged emotions, especially since they spend so much time together that it’s nearly always pulsing and shifting just slightly.

 

“Because having that many marks is weird. Two is fine, maybe even three rarely, but not four,” Alex says bluntly. “And nobody wants to see a kid with a grey mark.”

 

Kara snaps the band on and flexes carefully, frowning down at the constricting feeling. She takes it back off. “What’s wrong with grey?”

 

“They’re dead, Kara,” snaps Alex, though she widens her eyes like she startled herself admitting it. She opens her mouth, then shakes her head and retreats downstairs.

 

Kara looks down at her arm and snaps the band back on.

 

She’s lost a whole planet.  _ What’s one more? _ Kara tries to tell herself, but it hurts all the same.

 

**Yellow**

 

Kara groans when the first thing she can hear again is Siobhan’s laughter. The woman’s scream had just barely not thrown her out the window, but her ears were ringing painfully and she was definitely disoriented.

 

Siobhan grabs the back of her dress and, with impressive strength, spins Kara up and onto her desk. The desk crumples a little as her back slams into it.

 

She can hear Lucy whispering frantically now while James tries to soothe her panic, can hear the snap and crackle of Leslie’s electricity next to the beat of Cat’s heart in the doorway to her office.

 

“I’ve always wondered why you wore this ugly thing,” Siobhan murmurs, and her fingers scrabble against the snap to Kara’s band before she realizes it.

 

She’s still dizzy but Siobhan’s face as she processes Kara’s marks will be engrained in her memory for too long.

 

“Oh,” breathes Siobhan, then she repeats it louder, gleefully, “ _ oh. _ ” Her fingers dig into Kara’s skin, not that Kara can really feel it beyond the slightest of pressure. “Hey, Les! Get a look at this.”

 

Siobhan splays Kara’s arm out across the desk as Livewire drags Cat closer, and Kara hears the nearly collective intake of breath as the terrified and paralyzed office sees what she’s hidden for so long.

 

Leslie takes one look and cackles, shoving a stunned Cat in front in her. “Wow, I really thought your life couldn’t suck more than just being this one’s gopher, what with those megawatts you always flashed me before meetings.” She reaches forward to drag a nail over Kara’s wrist, electricity shocking between them. “Four and not a green in sight, huh? You go all out when you get rejected, Sunny.”

 

Kara grits her teeth, refuses to make any noise to acknowledge what they’ve revealed, blinking back hot angry tears.

 

Lucy’s mark on her wrist is red around the edges, but a cheery yellow in the middle. Orange permeates most of the lettering, though, often so dark it’s nearly red to the non-Kryptonian eye. Kara reassures herself it’s  _ not _ red, even as Lucy’s ire for Supergirl grows.

 

Sometimes she wishes that James’s name was on her wrist instead, but Kal-El was once again more fortunate than her. Two is a perfectly acceptable number of marks, echoes Alex’s voice in her mind.

 

Clark will always be more human than she will be. She’ll be lucky if Lucy is ever fully her friend like Clark and James are.

 

Leslie sighs, apparently bored. She waves a hand carelessly at Siobhan. “Go ahead, Cinnabon. You might actually be doing her a favor, all things considered.”

 

Siobhan screams again, and  _ this _ time she’s propelled out the window.

 

**Green**

 

“So I gotta ask,” Barry starts after his fifth donut. “What’s with the tattoos everyone has?”

 

Kara frowns. “They’re soul marks.”

 

“What, is that like a thing here?” He covertly eyes the wrists of the people in the store and Kara drags him away before he offends someone. “That’s so cool!” He spins around on the sidewalk. “What do the colors mean? Do  _ you _ have any? I mean, you’re an alien! Which is also super cool.”

 

“The colors reflect the relationship between two people,” Kara says, tugging her sleeve down further. Her band is probably still in the office where Siobhan dropped it. A piece of her donut breaks off and Barry speeds to catch it before it hits the pavement, popping it into his mouth. “Think of it like a stoplight pretty much.” It’s the easiest way to explain it. Considering how fast Alex and Astra sped to green, it’s not a bad metaphor either. She pauses. “Wait, are you saying your universe doesn’t have soul marks?”

 

“Not really,” Barry says nonchalantly. “Everybody just plays it by ear. But knowing who you’re going to be with must be a relief.” He frowns when Kara doesn’t respond. “Right?”

 

“Oh, yeah, I guess.”

 

“So,” he starts, waggling his eyebrows, “who’s lucky enough to be on your wrist?”

 

She’s been afraid to look since Barry showed up, but his kind eyes are on her and she finds the strength to push her sleeve up.

 

His eyebrows scrunch. “That’s… wow.” He traces her fourth mark. “Why is it white?”

 

“Grey,” she corrects. She’s not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed. “The Barry Allen of this universe… he died a couple years before my pod landed.”

 

Barry’s hand comes down over her fist, thumb rubbing over knuckles. “I’m sorry.”

 

He doesn’t say anything else about it, or offer to fix it, and that makes it better in a way.

 

**Blue**

 

She’s lost her powers, blew them out helping Barry get back home after fighting Livewire and Silver Banshee. (She’s not thinking about Leslie and Siobhan, with their matching green marks so bright they almost  _ glowed _ even in the darkness of the D.E.O.)

 

She’s also slightly tipsy, and her heart hurts, aches over all the missed opportunities that have slid by her without her consent.

 

It doesn’t matter that when she returned to the office, Cat and Lucy had looked at her with something akin to wonder and sadness. She already knows those marks won’t ever match the light shade of yellow that Alex’s name is. It took years for her and Alex to stabilize to that point.

 

Kara can predict it already. Cat will soften minutely, but always keep her at arm’s length, too focused on the color of their marks and their positions in society and just how many marks Kara has that might be better for her and every other hurdle that has separated them.

 

How Kara longs for the days when she would trace the foreign alphabet that made up her sole mark, wondering what it meant and where her soulmate was. But that was more than thirty-five years ago now.

 

Lucy will just feel bad for her, feel guilty for having James’s name in green. It’s neither of their faults, but she’ll feel bad about it nonetheless, at least for a while. Long enough for Kara to wish several times over that Lucy had never found out.

 

The smallest comfort is the liberation of her secret identity with the two.

 

So, she’s tipsy, melancholy, and hurting as she makes her way to the shop just a few blocks from her apartment and makes her selection.

 

“That one,” she says, barely managing not to slur, and the man sighs, like he gets that request a lot and Kara imagines that he must. “But not red. I hate red.”

 

“Gold then?” He asks, but she shakes her head.

 

“No. I hate red,” she repeats. “And gold’s too yellow.” The words come slowly to her brain. “Make it blue.”

 

The man’s brow furrows, but he shrugs after a moment and understanding crosses his face when she offers her arm. “Okay. Why not?”

 

Kara resolves that it’s the last time she’ll ever care about colors. 

 

She loves too much in every way. But she wears blue not for her cousin or her mother or her house, but because blue has no meaning. Blue is a color that has never tried to tell her what to feel.

 

Kara will take that blue and the crest of the House of El tattooed onto her skin and imprinted into her very being and turn it into something solely for herself.


End file.
